Bill Gates just brought a jar of human poop on stage during a speech. Yes, you read that right.

To be fair, there was a good reason for Gates' use of the unusual prop. He was appearing at the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, China, talking about the need for safe sanitation throughout the world and the Gates Foundation's role in funding better sanitation options.

While talking about the diseases and other threats that comes to exposure to excrement in areas of the world without adequate sanitation, Gates plopped his jar of poop right next to him for full effect. Read more...

As one of the world's richest men and most active philanthropists, Bill Gates usually has his hands full. Just not with poop. So it came as a surprise when the founder of Microsoft brandished a jar of human waste at a forum on the future of the toilet in Beijing on Tuesday. The stunt was an effort to draw attention to a problem affecting deve ...

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates has unveiled a futuristic toilet that doesn’t need water or sewers and uses chemicals to turn human waste into fertilizer. The mega-rich philanthropist is known for this potty-minded obsession with all things lavatorial, having famously swigged ‘poo ...

As one of the world’s richest men and most active philanthropists, Bill Gates usually has his hands full. Just not with poop. So it came as a surprise when the founder of Microsoft brandished a jar of human waste at a forum on the future of the toilet in Beijing on Tuesday. The stunt was an ef...

EU finance ministers have delayed plans to tax tech giants on sales rather than profits. Alex Cobham of the Tax Justice Network tells us why his organisation supports a move to delay in hopes of a global consensus, and Luca Cassetti of Ecommerce Europe argues that if the EU does take unilateral action, it could spark retaliation. Also in the programme, our reporter looks at plans to provide the entire world with satellite broadband service. As Americans across the country head to the polls in mid-term elections, our reporter is in the state of Indiana to find out what role trade is playing when it comes to the vote. Plus as billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates reveals plans to reinvent the toilet, professor Kala Vairavamoorthy, chief executive of the International Water Association, which works with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, tells us why Mr Gates is putting such a priority on waste innovation.

Speaking at the Reinvented Toilet expo in China, former Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates makes a push for advances in sanitation to reduce pathogens that kill nearly half a million children each year.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has kicked off a Reinvented Toilet Expo in China by using a jar of human faeces as a sidekick. The former chief executive of Microsoft said the technologies on display in Beijing are the most significant advances...

Beijing (AFP) Nov 6, 2018
As one of the world's richest men and most active philanthropists, Bill Gates usually has his hands full. Just not with poop.
So it came as a surprise when the founder of Microsoft brandished a jar of human waste at a forum on the future of the toilet in Beijing on Tuesday.
The stunt was an effort to draw attention to a problem affecting developing countries around the world: not enough

Americans vote in nationwide elections that are seen as referendum on Donald Trump's presidency. The elections come halfway through Mr. Trump's four years in office and follow a divisive campaign.
Also, UN says more than 200 mass graves found in areas of Iraq formerly held by IS, Palestinian anxiety as Israel develops closer ties with Arab states, and Bill Gates launches new range of 'reinvented' toilets to try and reduce disease worldwide.

The Microsoft co-founder held the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday, a chance for companies to showcase toilets that improve hygiene, don’t have to connect to sewage systems and can break down human waste into fertilizer.

The Microsoft co-founder held the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday, a chance for companies to showcase toilets that improve hygiene, don’t have to connect to sewage systems and can break down human waste into fertilizer.

In a 30-second video recorded on Oct. 28, a female pedestrian holding a bicycle helmet is seen making a phone call. She’s complaining about a car blocking a crosswalk on a busy street in Portland, Ore. The phone call ends and the car’s occupants—a young black man and woman—walk up to her and take her to task for reporting them. Some angry words are directed at the bicyclist by the man—“go back to your f—ing neighborhood”—and then the video ends.

If this encounter had unfolded in a normal part of the world, this would be where the story ends: Just another squabble in the battle between drivers and non-drivers over public space. But Portland is not normal. This is a city where antifa mobs are allowed to set up roadblocks and mob elderly drivers, all with the mayor’s apparent acquiescence.

The latest, above-described victim is a 28-year-old white woman who was captured on video during a phone call with the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s non-emergency parking hotline. The car belonged to Rashsaan Muhammad, who was with his partner, Mattie Khan. They parked improperly on a North Portland street while ordering food from a nearby burger restaurant. While filming, Ms. Khan accused the bicyclist of being “another white person calling the police on a black person.” She wasn’t. Portland Police have no record of that phone call taking place.

It is hard to know how the pedestrian, derogatorily christened “Crosswalk Cathy” on social media, could have known the race of the car’s owners. Portland doesn’t offer its residents race-tagged parking permits (yet), and the incident occurred on a busy business street. But that didn’t stop Portland Mercury news editor Alex Zielinski from writing a provocative (and wrong) story with the headline, “Woman calls cops on Portland man’s parking job. She’s white. He’s black.”

The report, video, and misinformation went viral and spawned a series of other stories targeting the woman. “Portland, Ore., couple Rashsaan Muhammad and Mattie Khan were running to grab a quick bite to eat at Big Burger (sic) when they spotted a woman bearing the skin color of an American terrorist standing across the street looking at their parked car,” read one unsubtle story at The Root. “White lady dubbed ‘Crosswalk Cathy’ called cops because she didn’t like how black couple parked,” headlined another on BET. Newsweek was slightly more charitable, saying she had “allegedly” called the cops. They were all wrong.

Last week’s race controversy ignited by Portland Mercury is not the first time the progressive alternative paper has published race-baiting content. Last year, it ran a libelous (and subsequently retracted) column accusing various restaurants of religious and cultural appropriation—and suggesting they were guilty of “culinary white supremacy.” The predictable result of that column was the siccing of a mob on the female owners of Kook’s Burritos, the business featured most prominently in the piece. They deleted their social media accounts, shut down their food cart, and went into hiding.

“Tribal hatreds are a dangerous thing to stoke,” said Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Diversity Delusion. She says most Americans are naïve about the tribal violence that defines much of the historical and modern human experience. “In the worst case, [victim ideologues] are fueling the fires of violent civil strife.”

The genre of “white people doing something to black people” is, by now, a well-established media genre that generates easy clicks. But there is also an unsettling subplot that few seem willing to discuss. The two people of color who star in last week’s viral video both act abominably toward a young woman they’ve just met. In a city where too many bicyclists and pedestrians have been struck and killed in car accidents (2017 was one of the deadliest years with 45 killed), the woman did her role as a good citizen by calling a non-emergency hotline to report the car blocking the crosswalk.

And it was Ms. Khan, not the pedestrian, who instantly racialized the incident, while her male partner called the woman an “idiot” and told her that she doesn’t belong in the neighborhood. Who’s the racist—not to mention segregationist—here?

The couple’s abominable behavior didn’t end after that encounter and the publication of the video on Oct. 29, however. Within hours, Ms. Khan named the bicyclist publicly and posted her photo on social media. Friends and followers of Ms. Khan then continued the doxing, publishing more photos and personal details of the woman. Twitter activist “@Sahluwal,” who only identified himself to me as “Simar,” reposted the video in a tweet watched over 200,000 times. “Twitter, do your thing and identify this woman,” he wrote. Simar told me he was not a witness and did not verify the claim in the video.

Sha Ongelungel, who was recently profiled glowingly as a racial justice activist in The Guardian, published the woman’s employer information on Twitter and encouraged others to call or email them. They obliged and demanded that she be fired. Ms. Ongelungel stopped responding after I inquired if she took any steps to verify the couple’s (false) allegation.

And like the owners of Kook’s Burritos the year before, the victim at the center of the video has deleted her social media presence, taken down her website, and gone into hiding. Her email is no longer listed at her employer’s page. Even some of her family who share the same surname have done the same. This sort of disappearing act now happens regularly in Portland—a new form of excommunication.

While Ms. Khan’s behavior may seem cruel and anti-social, there is a sort of rational logic to it: Progressive Portland is a city where even the most absurd claims of racism are taken seriously and prosecuted hysterically by the media and public.

In May, for instance, a black woman named Lillian Green launched a web campaign against Portland’s Back to Eden Bakery after the vegan shop declined to serve her after closing hours. In the video, she was admirably forthright about her motives for telling the world about this experience: Using the hashtag #LivingWhileBlack, Ms. Green—a doctoral student at Lewis and Clark College—explained that she wants to “blast their ass” on Facebook.

And blasted it was. The owners fired the two women working that evening and offered Ms. Green a job training the remaining employees in “racial inclusivity.” Such incidents send a clear message: Shaming white people, with or without merit, works. People will treat you as a hero. And you will get what you want.

Mattie Khan is now selling clothing merchandise of “Crosswalk Cathy.” She announced the sale on Facebook with a video of Rashsaan Muhammad modeling one of the hoodies at $45 a pop (t-shirts are $25).

In a city whose guilty whites seem ready to roll over on any pretext, no complaint is too absurd to become fodder for race hustling.

Today, many educated people believe that (1) our lives are controlled by invisible, malevolent forces like "structural racism." (2) An evil class of people is born with special powers ("privilege") that allow them to manipulate these forces for their own benefit

written by Jonny Anomaly

People are pattern-seekers. When we observe patterns in the natural world we often seek a deeper explanation for them. An example of a pattern that has captured the attention of academics is the disparity between men and women in fields like mechanical engineering and pediatrics.

Culture is an obvious explanation for some disparities: if a wave of Irish immigrants to Boston joins fire departments, and Italians start restaurants, then we might expect that the next generation of Bostonians will contain a disproportionate number of Irish firefighters and Italian restaurant owners. Similarly, if low-skilled immigrants tend to work in jobs like construction and agriculture, we might expect to find a lot of low-skilled workers who move from Central America to the United States to work on construction sites and strawberry farms.

Another obvious way to explain divergent outcomes between groups is that some groups – ranging from races and sexes, to religions and political partisans – have been discriminated against or persecuted by others. In other words, members of some groups throughout history were not given the opportunity to show their true talents in some fields.

Historically, ethnic discrimination was the norm, not the exception. In fact, ethnic discrimination was almost certainly adaptive for our ancestors who had to decipher, however crudely, who to trust and who to shun. Discrimination often served the function of increasing trust within a group by preventing members of other groups from enjoying access to valuable social goods that took effort to produce and preserve.

Persistent Performance Gaps

When we want to explain performance gaps, the obvious places to start are culture, bias, and discrimination. But in the mid-to-late twentieth century nearly every Western country abolished discriminatory laws, and many also implemented affirmative action programs. Governments, universities, and private firms made active efforts to recruit traditionally persecuted minorities into schools and jobs to which they previously lacked full access.

Under these conditions, some groups improved their outcomes while others did not. Jews and Asians, in particular, have thrived in every Western country in which they are found, and in many cases, they make more money, commit fewer crimes, and attain higher levels of education than the majority group in the societies to which they have migrated.

Moreover, despite the tedious proclamations of politicians that women have a long way to go in Western countries, we are much closer to parity than many believe. The majority of college graduates are now women, and the pay gap between men and women is almost non-existent when we compare workers in the same occupation at the same level. (According to Harvard economist Claudia Golden, most pay gaps are due to choices made by men and women to work in different occupations based on personal interests: women who have children, for example, understandably prefer more flexible jobs, which often pay less.)

As explicit discrimination decreased, social scientists began proposing alternatives to explain remaining gaps. Two, in particular, became popular in the 1990s: stereotype threat and epigenetics. Stereotype threat (supposedly) occurs when people are asked to perform a task and then informed that, on average, members of their group are not especially good at that task. They then perform worse than they otherwise would have. Epigenetics refers to the fact that gene expression is influenced by extra-genomic factors. Some social scientists proposed that if genes can be expressed differently in different environments, perhaps stressful environments can lead some groups to perform more poorly than others by affecting gene expression.

But stereotype threat has turned out to be a spectacular failure in explaining achievement gaps. And epigenetics is unlikely to explain disparities like why Asians outperform Africans on math exams, and why Africans outperform Asians in sports that involve sprinting.

Unfalsifiable Hypotheses

When the predictions generated by these explanations failed to pan out, many began to turn to invisible forces like “structural racism” and “implicit bias” to explain achievement gaps. One problem with these hypotheses (as they are often employed) is that they are impossible to falsify. In fact, that seems to be the point: if we can’t test the hypothesis that unconscious bias and structural racism explain achievement gaps, they become perfect candidates for an all-purpose explanation that can be held with the force of a religious dogma.

When we see an achievement gap, we can invoke bias without even thinking about alternatives, and dismiss as a “racist” or “sexist” anyone who proposes the hypothesis that biology plays a role in explaining some achievement gaps.

Of course, biases exist, and sometimes they are at odds with our explicit value judgments. In these cases, it’s worth spreading social norms that aim to combat unfair biases. But some biases are useful heuristics, and some stereotypes are rational generalizations, like the belief that we have a greater chance of being violently assaulted by a man than a woman, or that the next international chess champion is more likely to be Jewish than Eritrean. In these cases, it is arguably morally wrong to prevent ourselves from believing what the evidence suggests.

When we hear someone attribute achievement gaps to implicit bias or structural racism, an obvious question to ask is: What would count as evidence against your hypothesis?

Vague Language

Structural racism (or sexism) is such an amorphous term that it is hard to know how to analyze it. We might first look to government institutions and private firms and ask whether they have policies of discrimination. In some countries, government agencies and businesses alike have policies that explicitly discriminate against entire classes of people (for example, in Saudi Arabia a man’s testimony in court has twice the evidentiary value of a woman’s). But in many Western countries like the United States and Australia, discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation is explicitly forbidden by law. Affirmative action programs actually do allow employers to discriminate – but they typically discriminate against rather than in favor of men of Asian or European descent.

Of course, we might think that although laws forbid discrimination, implicit bias leads some people to unconsciously discriminate against potential employees and co-workers. Implicit bias is hard to test, but the best evidence we have so far suggests that even when implicit bias exists it does not affect behavior very much, if at all. Despite the weak evidence for implicit bias as an explanation for achievement gaps, many corporations, and educational institutions have diversity training programs aimed at combating its allegedly pernicious effects.

Similar claims can be made about “misogyny,” which is the new term for “sexism” coined by radical feminists who claim that even if most people don’t consciously discriminate against women, an unconscious hatred of women helps explain why men and women exhibit different characteristics, which lead to different outcomes.

Will those who cite implicit bias, structural racism, or internalized misogyny respond to the evidence against their claims? Or will they instead retreat to untestable claims couched in vague language which allows them to save their hypothesis no matter what scientists find?

Conclusion

Those of us who suspect biology plays a role in explaining some group differences do not deny the existence of bias, which is especially powerful in traditional societies that lack norms of toleration and laws that protect minorities. But we are skeptical that racism or sexism or other pernicious forms of bias can explain all of the gaps that we see. More importantly, our hypothesis is falsifiable. One way to falsify it would be to find that genes which influence physical and mental traits – including abilities and interests – are identically distributed across human groups.

If people want to search for the different causes of achievement gaps by proposing testable scientific hypotheses, we welcome them to the debate. But we are frustrated by the seemingly unfalsifiable nature of the hypotheses that are increasingly put forward to defend the view that all groups are the same, and that all indications of difference are evidence of evil.

UK: Public anger is rising against flashy billionaires such as Philip Green and it’s bound to give a boost to Corbyn’s cause

A full month before pantomime season begins, our favourite villain has returned to the stage in a puff of green smoke: Sir Philip of Monaco. Boo! Hiss! Bubbling under recent coverage has been something approaching delight. Many long for Green’s comeuppance. Dislike of the man stretches back long before these bullying accusations, before BHS hit the rocks and before his shoddy treatment of its pensioners. Two words sum up why Green is long-loathed: greed and vulgarity.

It is one thing to be rich, another to parade it as showily as Green has done (while limiting payments to the taxman). Most famously, there were the parties. His 50th birthday bash was a £5 million event that saw Sir Philip dressed as Emperor Nero. His 55th had performances by George Michael and Jennifer Lopez, pushing the bill up to a rumoured £20 million. The 60th was a more modest affair, only £6 million to cover the numerous bottles of Pol Roger and singalong with Stevie Wonder. Green is a cartoon tycoon, perma-tanned and model-draped, possessing the daddy of all yachts in Lionheart. This £115 million, 295-foot monster troubles the Med’s prettiest harbours each summer blaring the message that its owner is, as the old Harry Enfield character used to declare, “considerably richer than you”.

Green is not the only person to splash the cash, of course, but his profile and pugnacity make him a lightning rod for our dislike of flashy braggarts everywhere. He embodies the culture of vulgarity that has grown ever since loadsamoney City traders flashed their wads of notes in the Eighties. It used to be that modesty was lauded and greed was a cardinal sin. Now the reverse seems true. Displays of wealth that would once have seemed unbelievably crass now barely raise an eyebrow.

The property developer Nick Candy boasts in an interview of the fleet of sports cars he and his brother Christian once owned: Rolls-Royce Phantom, Rolls-Royce convertible, Mercedes SLR McLaren, Ferrari F430 Spider and 575M Maranello, two Range Rovers and a Cherokee Jeep.

Tamara Ecclestone (daughter of Bernie, the Formula One boss) stars in a reality show that lingers on the details of her luxuriant life, from her £70 million house to her many butlers. Plutocrats’ offspring display incredible wealth on Instagram: being waited on in Monte Carlo and buried under Tiffany purchases in New York. A craze sweeping Russia and China shows how such tackiness has gone global. The “flaunt your wealth” challenge has Instagrammers posing corpse-like on the ground next to their luxury car or aircraft as though just pitched out of it, surrounded by Gucci bags, Prada sunglasses, piles of banknotes and jewels.

Most notoriously there is the endless race among the super-rich to build bigger and swankier boats. Last week this paper reported on a surge in demand for mega-yachts, with a predicted 40 per cent increase in the number of 100 metre-plus vessels built in the next few years. One industry figure puts this down to one-upmanship: owners needing to trump each other with multiple decks, helicopter pads, submersible vehicles, piano bars and cinemas.

Criticism of such excess is easily shut down as “the politics of envy”. Defenders of the super-rich ask, “Why shouldn’t they enjoy the fruits of their labours? Lighten up! Let the high-rollers roll!” Call it the politics of envy all you like, but the truth is that as life continues to grind hard for many in our country, as wages continue to stagnate, conspicuous consumption seems not only tacky and crass but taunting and cruel.

Green once complained that he was the victim of “envy and jealousy” but such lifestyles are designed to draw attention and inevitably spark envy. For many among the super-rich, their bought delights are not to be privately enjoyed but publicly shared. Part of the pleasure is in people witnessing your extravagance. In an age when social media and celebrity coverage trumpet every movement of the rich and famous, this means decadent, champagne-spraying spending being rubbed in the face of millions who have bugger all. These displays don’t inspire the hospital porter on the night shift or the carer on minimum wage to reach for the stars — they just make them feel inadequate and small, locked out of a Gatsby-like world.

This is why those who wear their wealth gaudily on their sleeve should be careful. The resentment caused is grist to the socialists’ mill. Anger about inequality is growing, not only among the have-nots but among the have-somethings. The more the super-rich seem to float off into a gilded bubble beyond the rest of us, the more voters will wish for them to be brought to heel. If a Corbyn government should come to “eat the rich”, as the hard-left placards say, if Chancellor McDonnell plays Robin Hood with some painfully (and destructively) redistributive policies, the flashy rich may only have themselves to blame.

To be clear: I don’t believe being on the Rich List makes you a bad person — far from it. I have great admiration for those with the entrepreneurial chutzpah to rise high and prosper. But there are ways to handle extreme wealth with class and even grace. In an essay entitled The Gospel of Wealth, the great Gilded Age philanthropist Andrew Carnegie said the duties of the very wealthy were to shun “display or extravagance” and consider themselves “trustees for the poor”.

Many around the world have taken these words as a manifesto. There are the highly generous, like Bill Gates with his Giving Pledge, and there are those who shun extravagance too. Ingvar Kamprad, the late founder of Ikea, flew only in economy class. The Mexican magnate Carlos Slim drives himself to work. Warren Buffett never spends more than $3.17 on breakfast. In Britain there are many rich people who go about their business modestly and take their responsibilities as trustees for the poor seriously. They start schools in deprived areas, fund mentoring and scholarships, pay enormous amounts in tax and don’t deserve to be tarnished by the brush of Green and his flashy ilk.

The awful “flaunt your wealth” challenge brought to my mind a woman who died in AD 79 . On the outskirts of Pompeii archaeologists found her wearing heavy gold armbands, rings and chains, carrying a bag containing more bracelets, rings, necklaces and a thick braid of gold. Weighed down by her gaudy riches as she ran from the erupting Vesuvius, she is a symbol of the adage that you can’t take it with you.

The super-rich should consider not only how they want to be perceived today but remembered tomorrow. Do they wish to be fossilised surrounded by Ferraris, gold bathtubs and Cartier bracelets or remembered, as the Carnegies and the Rockefellers are, for something better? The choice is theirs.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

The Microsoft co-founder held the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday, a chance for companies to showcase toilets that improve hygiene, don’t have to connect to sewage systems and can break down human waste into fertilizer.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Tuesday unveiled in Beijing a futuristic toilet that doesn’t need water or sewers and uses chemicals to turn human waste into fertilizer. The toilet, which Gates said was ready for sale after years of development, is the brainchild of research projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Reuters […]

November 6, 2018 -- #EcoToilet #ToiletExpo #China @BillGates Bill Gates has been showcasing new approaches for sterilising human waste at the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing. One approach favoured by the billionaire philanthropist is Caltech’s self-contained, domestic toilet and wastewater treatment system – a recent winner of his foundation’s “Reinventing the Toilet Challenge”. Graphic shows how the Caltech lavatory and sewage treatment process works.

\ Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates had his hands full on-stage in Beijing on Tuesday, showing a jar of human faeces. The stunt was part of his speech at the Reinvented Toilet Expo event – a showcase for new toilet technologies. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent more than $200m on […]

“This small amount of feces could contain as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.”

Gates went on to say that the pathogens in the fecal matter is known to cause diseases that kill nearly 500,000 children below 5-years-old every year.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was founded by Gates and his wife, has been working to address the world’s sanitation problems. Since 2011, the foundation has spent more than $200 million to improve research and development of safe sanitation technologies.

As one of the world's richest men and most active philanthropists, Bill Gates usually has his hands full. Just not with poop. So it came as a surprise when the founder of Microsoft brandished a jar of human waste at a forum on the future of the toilet in Beijing ...
Reported by Terra Daily 4 hours ago.

Space is a dark place – sunlight gets weaker the deeper into space you go. At 100 billion miles from the sun, the ninth planet would be a million times dimmer than Neptune. Most telescopes would struggle to see it even if they were pointed in the right...

MICROSOFT founder Bill Gates brandished a jar of human excrement during a speech in China yesterday as part of a plea for the safe disposal of human waste. The billionaire philanthropist placed the jar on a pedestal to kick off a three-day “Reinvented...

Oh sure, if Bill Gates brings a jar of poop to work everyone loves it, but if I bring a jar of poop to work I get pulled aside and lectured on proper office conduct. Yesterday, Bill Gates, poop enthusiast and co-founder of Microsoft, took the stage in Beijing brandishing a jar of human faeces. The...

The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, presented a high-tech toilet model that does not require water and a sewer connection at the international toilets exhibition in Beijing. Sanitary facilities using chemical reagents turn waste into fertilizer and clean water, reports Bloomberg . “The technologies you see here are the most significant achievement in the field of sanitation in […]

BILLIONAIRE Bill Gates yesterday revealed a futuristic toilet that does not need water or sewers and uses chemicals to turn human waste into fertiliser. It is expected to revolutionise lives of some of the world’s poorest people, who do not have...

Amazon plans to split HQ2 between two locations, Bill Gates unveils a futuristic toilet that doesn’t need water or sewers, and a voting machine manual that asks customers to re-use easy passwords makes its rounds on Reddit. Trending on Twitter, Amazon has changed its tune regarding its new HQ2 headquarters. The Seattle-based tech giant’s, which…

The reinvented toilets on display are a culmination of seven years of research and $200 million given by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which the former software tycoon runs with his wife, since 2011.

Oby Ezekwesili, the presidential aspirant of Action Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), has said lifting 80 million Nigerians out of poverty is the most crucial assignment she has. She said this while reacting to Bill Gates‘s declaration that the world can overcome extreme poverty as demonstrated by countries such as China, India, Mexico, South Africa, among others. […]

The Product Owner role is implemented in organizations in various different ways. The responsibilities and authorities of Product Owners vary across organizations, departments, teams and Product Owners. This can be explained to some extend, because it is a role that people need to grow into. The role requires some specific competences and a specific mindset. In addition, for many organizations it is a new and unknown role in which people (typically management) are trying to find the right balance of responsibilities and mandate. Preferably, a Product Owner has a lot of mandate and he or she is the final decision maker for the product. In many organizations this is not (yet) the case however.

In order to create clarity about the level of Product Ownership in your organization, we distinguish five types of Product Owners:

The Scribe

The Proxy

The Business Representative

The Sponsor

The Entrepreneur

The figure shows these different types of Product Owners visually. In this figure you'll see the expected benefits that can be achieved, based on the authorities (or maturity) of the Product Owner. A 'Scribe' therefore has few responsibilities and authorities, an 'Entrepreneur' has many responsibilities and authorities.

The image shows the growth path of the Product Owner as we often see it at organizations. Product Owners grow in their authorities and herewith, the added value of their role increases for the product, organization and customers. Having more mature Product Owners will enable organizations to experience more benefits of applying Scrum and value delivery will typically increase for the better. In the following paragraphs the different types of Product Owners are explained in more detail, and we will discuss how you as a Product Owner can take a step in the authorities that you have.

The Scribe
We often find the Scribe Product Owner role in organizations that are just starting out with Scrum, and/or in organizations that have not completely embraced the Agile mindset (and therefore do not apply Scrum properly). These organizations see the Product Owner primarily as someone who administers the Product Backlog, collects the wishes from the stakeholders and translates them into User Stories for the Development Team. This type of Product Owner often has none to very limited authorities. This Product Owner mainly ensures that the wishes of the stakeholders are written out in understandable language for the Development Team. In organizations where this type of Product Owner is very common, Business Analists or Requirements Engineers are often appointed as Product Owner. In such situations, the mandate often lies with someone else, such as a steering committee or a Project Management Office (PMO).

The Proxy
Just like the Scribe Product Owner, we often see the Proxy Product Owner (in short: Proxy) in organizations that are in a starting phase with an Agile way-of-working and in adopting the Scrum Framework. The Proxy has some more authorities than the Scribe has. The Proxy, for example, also often gets the authority to make (limited) choices in the ordering of the Product Backlog. However, the vision, the business goals, the desired outcomes/results and the scope is still being determined by other people, such as a steering committee, project sponsor or business owner. In many organizations we encounter Proxy Product Owners who used to be in the position of project manager or teamlead. These roles or positions typically already have the responsibility of bringing a project to a successful end. Therefore, it seems logical to many organizations to change these peoples' roles to 'Product Owner'. However, these Proxy Product Owners are not the final decision-makers. They typically have to ask for approval when changes happen. They have to ask for approval to change priorities. And they have to ask for approval when they want to change the planning, roadmap and Product Backlog.

The Business Representative
The next type of Product Owner is the Business Representative. The Business Representative is typically a representative from the business side of the organization, who knows the business context, market, customers and users well. Therefore, this person typically knows from experience what customers and users would need and/or what they would like to have. This person is typically one of the 'seniors' or 'experts' in the organization, who has connections to customers and/or users. This type of Product Owner could also be people like process owners or system owners. Although the term Business Representative suggests that this type of Product Owner comes from 'the business', this is not necessarily the case. It could also be that someone from the IT department is in the Product Owner role, with the maturity level 'Business Representative'. Examples of IT-people in this role could be information managers, architects or security experts. These people may have gained a lot of knowledge about the (technical) product, and therefore be suitable Product Owners. To strengthen this concept of having IT Product Owners... remember that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were excellent Product Owners too, and these guys really were 'IT-people'.

So, the Business Representative has more authorities than the Proxy. The Business Representative is typically responsible for a part of the product, a system or a (set of) process(ess). Within this system or process, this Product Owner may determine for him- or herself which work will be carried out by the Development Team. The Business Representative is therefore responsible for the Product Backlog and he or she has the authority to manage the Product Backlog by themselves. This is however, only as long as the desired changes can be done within the budget that was allocated by other people, such as management or a steering committee. The Business Representative does not have an own budget to spend as desired. He or she needs to get approval for budget changes and therefore often still has to deal with a steering committee or manager. The Business Representative also typically has a list of work to be done, projects to perform or goals to achieve, which were defined by someone else.

The Sponsor
In contrast to the Business Representative, the Sponsor has his or her own budget. This is the biggest difference between the 'Business Representative' and the 'Sponsor'. In addition to budget responsibility, the authorities for both types of Product Owners are fairly similar. The Product Owner type 'Sponsor' is initially often filled in by business managers, IT managers and customers (in a business-to-business setting) for example. Since Sponsor Product Owners have their own budget, they typically also have more opportunities for up- and downscaling the Development Team. This doesn't mean that you should add or subtract people per Sprint! It could be however, that due to enormous success of the product, the Product Owner would like to scale up to a second or a third team. By having this flexibility and authority these 'Sponsors' can therefore accelerate and delay developments much more, and therefore they have a greater impact on the return on investment and total cost of ownership of the product. Besides the budget authority, Sponsor Product Owners also have a bigger say in 'what' needs to be done. He or she is allowed to define the work to be done, the projects to perform or business goals to achieve.

The Entrepreneur
The last type of Product Owner is called the 'Entrepreneur'. In practice, we also refer to this role as the 'mini-CEO'. This level of Product Ownership is what we ultimately want to achieve in organizations. This type of Product Owner can achieve the most impact for customers, users and the organization by far. The Entrepreneur Product Owner takes full responsibility for the product and also has full authority over the product. The Entrepreneur Product Owner is someone with a strong vision on the market, customers and the product. It is someone with passion for the product and is someone with strong leadership and communication skills. Entrepreneur Product Owners are ultimately responsible for the product and are therefore profit & loss responsible. Besides product development, they are also responsible for maintenance, operations, marketing, legal aspects and sales. That is why we typically refer to this level as 'mini-CEO'. It is a Product Owner who has his or her own 'mini-company' (which could be a mini-company within a large enterprise).

Growing responsibilities and authorities
So there are five types of Product Owners, each having their own focus, key responsibilities and authorities. With this growth model you can make an estimation for yourself which type of Product Owner you are, or which types of Product Owners you find in your organization. Remember that the (hierarchical) function within the organization only partially determines which type of Product Owner a person is. If a Product Owner used to be in a management function, he or she probably has some more authorities already. This may help Product Owners to grow faster through the maturity model, but it is not a prerequisite to be or to have been a manager! The authorities a Product Owner has are not only determined by their (previous) function. The authorities are mainly determined by the way you act. By the way the person behaves. In our experience, authorities aren't given away 'for free'. Getting more authorities needs to be earned. And the way you earn more authorities is by taking more responsibility and showing ownership.

But how do you take on more responsibilities as a Product Owner? Well, actually that is quite simple... You increase your responsibilities by taking more ownership and responsibility for the success of the product, step by step. For example, develop the product vision and actively promote it amongst your team, stakeholders and management. Actively collaborate with your key stakeholders. Show how you and your team are adding value for customers and users. Make value measurable. And also have a clear view on the costs. Create transparency on these topics and show that you are taking responsibility for the product. Be proactive and do not wait until someone does it for you. So, take initiative. With this you will create more room for yourself to decide things, and thus get more authorities. Successful Product Owners that we have met take responsibility. In many cases, these Product Owners started out as Scribes or Proxy's. Many of them have developed into Sponsors or Entrepreneurs.

The term 'Product Owner' isn't just made up, because the creators of Scrum 'needed a name'. The name of this role actually contains the word 'owner'. So the role is about 'owning' the product and it's about taking the responsibilities that come with owning a product. Therefore, ownership is exactly what you have to display to your stakeholders. This is not just about things like the product vision, Product Backlog and financial aspects. It's about your attitude, about your mindset and behaviors. So it may help to regularly reflect. Look yourself in the eye. Have you really done everything you could to improve the product? Are any setbacks caused by others, or could youhave done something in a different way? Take ownership!

I hope this blog helps you to gain some insights into the growth path for Product Owners and some steps you could take to increase your responsibilities and authorities as a Product Owner. There is of course much more you could do, but I'm also curious about your own experiences! What type of Product Owner are you? Which steps did you take to grow? What are the next steps for you as a Product Owner?

BILLIONAIRE Bill Gates yesterday revealed a futuristic toilet that does not need water or sewers and uses chemicals to turn human waste into fertiliser. It is expected to revolutionise lives of some of the world's poorest people, who do not have acces

The winners and losers from the midterms, Bill Gates wants to build a better toilet, a massive spending spree at Harrods goes off the rails, Alec Baldwin gets more bad news, and "single-use" is the word of the year.
A record number of Ada County voters showed up at the polls in Tuesday's midterm election, part of statewide and national trend that saw unprecedented voter engagement. Idaho's next governor will be Brad Little, who led a Republican slate of candidates who were all successful in their respective contests for statewide office. Republican Janice McGeachin will become Idaho's first female Lieutenant Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra won a tight contest with Democratic challenger Cindy Wilson. The most-anticipated Gem State contest of the evening wasn't even close: A majority of Idaho voters said "yes" to Medicaid expansion, thumbing a collective nose to the Idaho Legislature which has repeatedly pushed back any previous attempt to expand Medicaid to cover tens of thousands of uninsured men, women and children. The other high-profile statewide proposition, an effort to return gambling machines to horse racing venues, went down to defeat following a bruising point/counterpoint media blitz from both sides. At the Idaho State Statehouse, a few Democrats were successful in upsetting incumbent Republican lawmakers in the Idaho House and Senate. In Boise's 15th legislative district, Democrat Steve Berch upended veteran Republican House Rep. Lynn Luker, and Democrat Jake Ellis defeated Republican House Rep. Patrick McDonald. In that same district's State Senate race, incumbent Republican Sen. Fred Martin was leading Democratic challenger Jim Bratnober by just a handful of votes, which will most probably trigger an official recount. In the Wood River Valley, Democrat Muffy Davis handily defeated Republican House Rep. Steve Miller; and in Eastern Idaho, Democratic challenger Chris Abernathy beat Republican House Rep. Dustin Manwaring. Big change will be coming to the Ada County Commission in 2019: two Democratic women won their respective races Tuesday night: Diana Lachiondo defeated Republican incumbent Commissioner Jim Tibbs; and Democrat Kendra Kenyon defeated Republican Sharon Ullman. At the Ada County Highway District, incumbent Paul Woods lost to challenger Mary May and incumbent ACHD Commissioner Kent Goldthorpe held off three challengers. Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson handily won reelection to the U.S. House, and he'll be joined by Republican Russ Fulcher who won his race to see who would take over the vacated seat of outgoing Congressman Raul Labrador. On the national level, Democrats gained control of the U.S. House and several governerships, but Republicans increased their majority in the U.S. Senate. Billionaire Bill Gates wants to build better, cheaper toilets. The New York…

Each week, Ava and C.I. are out on the road meeting with groups to discuss Iraq. Kat goes with them on those trips a great deal. With the weather getting colder, she has been in a soup mode and not really in the mood for canned soup. So Ava and C.I. whipped up a soup this week that Kat insisted they make "again and again." I asked them to write down the recipe and was told, "Trina, you have that book. You recommended it and we bought it." That was flattering.

Peel and finely chop the onion. Wash the celery stalks, trim and discard the ends and cut the stalks into 1/4-inch slices.Heat the oil in a medium-size pot over medium heat. Add the onion and celery and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to soften.Add the cumin and flour and stir carefully until both are fully absorbed into the onion/celery mixture. Add the corn, chilies, milk, salt and black pepper and stir thoroughly.Cook, uncovered, over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, for 8 to 10 minutes. Stir in the cheese and cook for another 1 to 2 minutes, or until the cheese melts and the soup is hot but not boiling. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle on a few tortilla chips, if you like, to provide crunch, and serve.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, made public Tuesday, underscores the role of inherited wealth in the growth of social inequality in the United States. The report, titled, “Billionaire Bonanza: Inherited Wealth Dynasties in the 21st-Century United States,” analyzes the Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States, and finds that one-third of them derived their wealth primarily from inheritance from their parents or from an even older generation of the super-rich.

The three wealthiest of the dynasties, the Waltons, the Koch brothers and the Mars family, saw their combined wealth increase nearly6,000 percent since 1982, while average household wealth in America actually declined slightly. These three families, based in retailing, oil production and food manufacturing respectively, had a combined wealth of $348.7 billion in 2018, up from $5.84 billion in 1982, adjusted to 2018 dollars.

Besides the seven Waltons, two Kochs and six Mars, the report notes nine Cargill heirs on the Forbes 400 list, along with five Johnsons (Fidelity Investments), nine Pritzkers (Hyatt Hotels), five heirs to the Cox media fortune, four heirs to the Duncan oil fortune, four Lauders (perfumes), five billionaires from the Johnson & Johnson empire, four Bass brothers (oil), three Strykers (medical equipment), and so on. The top 15 billionaire dynasties had a combined wealth of $618 billion.

In the 100 years since the first US “Gilded Age,” the vast wealth of the original dynastic families like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies and DuPonts has been dispersed among large numbers of descendants, as well as diluted by progressive taxation (before 1980) and, in a few cases, by transfer to foundations. Few heirs of the original “robber barons” now make the Forbes 400 list. But the report notes, “Now several decades into the second Gilded Age, dynastic wealth families once again appear in force on the Forbes 400 list. And like previous dynasties, a segment of these families use their considerable wealth and power to rig the rules of the economy to protect and expand their wealth and power.”

These wealthy families have pushed through major changes in the tax and inheritance laws that will allow them to pass on their wealth to the next generation virtually without hindrance—changes which will be taken advantage of by the new layer of super-rich, personified by the trio of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose combined wealth is greater than that of the bottom half of the American population.

But their impact on American social and political life goes well beyond the immediate accumulation and preservation of family fortunes. The report begins by citing a warning by Paul Volcker—who, as the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the US central bank, was intimately familiar with the political and social psychology of this layer—about the dangers of the rule over society by a tiny elite of the fabulously rich.

“The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy,” Volcker said. “We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. And they don’t like government and they don’t like to pay taxes.” Hence the agenda of tax-cutting and deregulation carried out by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

We are fleeced. Daily. Our politicians take our money for their salaries but refuse to actually represent us. Our politicians take our money -- our tax dollars -- and refuse to spend those dollars to better our health, to better our education, to better our lives. Instead, they fleece us dry and send that money to war and war makers and death and destruction.

Friday, November 2, 2018. Actions in DC this weekend as the never-ending wars continue.

On this week's BLACK AGENDA RADIO, hosts Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey spoke with Omali Yeshitela about a number of topics including the actions in DC this weekend which include the march Saturday on the White House.Nellie Bailey: This year, the theme is US Out Of Africa. Omali Yeshitela is chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition. He says the US Command in Africa (AFRICOM) is there to prop up foreign, economic and social control over the continent. But Yeshitela says American global rule is in disarray.Omali Yeshitela: Things are falling apart but it's an extremely dangerous moment as well -- which is one of those things that makes our mobilization so important and even how we've characterized our mobilization: There is no peace, Africa and Africans are at war, US to the world "Comply or Die."I think it's quite appropriate, looking at what we see, that this chaos -- and some of it even maybe planned chaos -- this false debate that's going on between different sectors of the ruling class who are calling themselves Republicans and Democrats as part of a shell game that they play against the masses of people, with some of them using impoverished and desperate people, in order to make their political point while others are using the same phenomenon to make a point that speaks to reaction and calling on the whole reactionary history of the United States government and the White population of this country. So you've got one sector with a very cynical and callous way of using the poverty, the oppression, even the actions of repressive sector of the bourgeois -- right now Trump represents the public face of that -- so you've got them using those actions to mobilize people, or attempt to mobilize people, for their own benefit which serves capital and not the people. Then you've got people like Trump and the social base that he represents in terms of reaction. All of them, again, using the people. And that's why the Black is Back mobilization is so critical at this moment because it calls on African people to get organized. It calls on Black people to get organized. It calls on us to come to terms with the fact that even when we look at this crisis of imperialism, that there's an escalated aggression that's being made against our people, against the people of the world, and even against the ability of the people to protest against the things that are happening to us. So it's a splendid moment but it's also, like I said, a very dangerous moment. A wounded animal, as you know, as has often been described correctly so, is most dangerous and that's what we're looking at here with the United States government, US imperialism and, in many ways, imperialism in general. But, of course, the hegemon is wounded and that creates an interesting sort of dynamics because everyone who is the friend of the hegemon is not a friend. They're a friend because it's the hegemon, it's got the guns, it's got all the money, it's got all the influence or appears to have but as you see US imperialism showing any signs of weakness in that case you will see -- and we are seeing -- the emergence of other forces who are willing -- even if timidly -- to challenge the hegemon for its own space and for its own interest. It's a very interesting and critical moment in history and the Black is Back is right on time, I think, to be pushing this mobilization.

The Black is Back coalition notes:

Hundreds of black people from throughout the U.S. and from every town, city and state, will descend on Washington, D.C.—capital of imperialist white power—on November 3 and 4.This is a Call for you to take your place in the rally, march and conference with the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations under the banner: “There is no Peace: Africa and Africans are at War!”For nine years in a row the Black is Back Coalition has been leading the charge to unite our people against the growing, desperate white nationalist attacks by the U.S. and other imperialist countries against our people and the colonized peoples and countries of the U.S. and the world.The Coalition is calling on everyone to join with our brothers and sisters at Malcolm X Park on Saturday, November 3 at 12 noon. Numerous speakers that represent our community’s demand for self-determination and our historical opposition to imperialist white power will expose the relentless war being waged against Africa, African people and the peoples of the world.At 2 P.M. there will be a black people’s march on the White House. Then there will be another rally at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House.On Sunday at 12 noon the people will gather for a conference at the Stuart Center, 821 Varnum Street NE for a full discussion of all these issues and resolutions of how we should move to defend ourselves against the war on our people in a process that will build a new world without black oppression and human exploitation.Every day the blood-stained list of African people within the U.S. who are shot or killed by U.S. white citizens or police grows grotesquely long. In 47 of the cities with the largest police departments, police shot at least 3,649 African people from 2010 through 2016.These same domestic military occupation forces are the primary instruments leading to the prisons within the U.S. bursting at the seams with African people who are now organizing within the prison concentration camps for an end to this colonial slavery that is justified by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. constitution.Regular white citizens are also assaulting our people with sometimes deadly consequences—in churches, on college campuses, at public transportation stations and in fast food restaurants, to name just a few places.In St. Louis-Ferguson, Missouri, with one of the highest incidences of police shootings in the U.S., the U.S. government, through the weapon of eminent domain, has confiscated nearly 100 acres of land previously owned by African people, to build a massive, $2 billion super-secret international spy station known as the National Geo-spatial Intelligence Station (NGA).This spy agency, to have its own police force in our community, is also part of an ever-expanding gentrification process in St. Louis that is daily driving our people into deeper poverty and despair.The Black is Back Coalition is also calling on you to join your brothers and sisters protesting the growing U.S. military secret wars in Africa.Hundreds of U.S. Special Operation forces are violently destroying villages and supporting thuggish African governments to prevent African workers from coming to power and gaining control of our own resources for Africa’s benefit instead of the benefit of white power.U.S. Special Operations forces are also in Africa to contend with China for economic influence. In addition, they are there to protect the interests of its junior imperialist partners on the Continent that contains at least a third of the world’s known mineral assets.

The U.S. has created a vast war project called the Africa Command or AFRICOM, a command center solely dedicated to keeping Africa under white power control and our people in a permanent state of violently impoverished exploitation and indirect colonial domination.The Black is Back Coalition is calling on African people to join in our protest of U.S. initiated or actual armed and economic warfare against and political destabilization of other countries like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China and Russia—countries that have refused to comply with U.S. imperialist demands.The Coalition’s 19-point National Black Political Agenda for Self-determination calls for an end to AFRICOM. It also demands that the U.S. get out of Africa, Asia and Latin America and pay reparations to Africa and Africans everywhere.We demand the upliftment of African women and the African family as well as black community control of police and the immediate withdrawal of U.S. domestic military forces from the African community.Come out to join with your brothers and sisters in the demand for the release of all our political prisoners and the end to the mass incarceration of our people and the release of African people from the colonial concentration camps called prison.The escalated attack by the U.S. on Africa and African people worldwide is evidence of the growing crisis of imperialist white power. The Black is Back Coalition is calling on all African people and friends of peace to join with us in a great celebration of resistance.We can win!We will win!We are winning!

This is who Trump is afraid of. The reason more troops are on the border now than currently in Iraq. LOOK.

Debra Messing 'discovers' Iraq. How very Columbus of her. She discovers it to complain that more US troops are on the US border than in Iraq. She's upset that there are not more US troops in Iraq. 15 years and counting of ongoing war and Debra is upset that more US troops are not in Iraq.

To Debra, this passes for 'logic.' Because, to Debra, continued and never-ending war -- hell, war period -- is a-okay and normal. War period? Debra Messing didn't speak out about the Iraq War. It was even a joke on WILL & GRACE. Debra's character protested not getting free noodles. That she protested. She said good people have to care and it was all a joke that she didn't care about war.

That's what the world is up against, selfish bitches who don't give a damn about people dying. The only time people matter to the Debra Messings is when they can be used for political football. So, to attack Donald Trump, Debra suddenly 'discovers' the Iraq War. She's fine with it. She doesn't protest it. She doesn't even call for an end to it. She's glad it's there because it allows her to use it for political football.

Shame on anyone who buys into her crap.

You can call out what Donald Trump is doing without seeking to justify war.

Otherwise, you're just the ridiculous Jim Sciuotto who only mentions Iraq to either endorse it so he can whine about the march or to endorse it so he can whine about the fact that, in two years of being president, Donald Trump has not visited Iraq. (For those who've forgotten, in eight years as president, Barack Obama only visited Iraq once.)

The wars are nothing but political props that the Jims and Debras grab on to repeatedly to try to political football. The fact that people are dying doesn't matter to them. Like the late Barbara Bush, they don't bother their 'beautiful minds' with such things.

As Trump plays golf & holds rallies at the expense of taxpayers, he has the nerve to tell our servicemen and women that he can't visit them in Iraq or Afghanistan because he's "very busy".

These people are fighting for us! Trump is not!

Trump doesn't care!

172 replies1,216 retweets3,497 likes

The US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't fighting "for us." They're fighting because the US government sent them there. Why are they there? Why are they still there?

Those are questions the world is asking but not questions that bother Tiny Ed because he's all about using war as a political football. He's a con artist who defrauded people and the fact that he's part of the 'resistance' should scare any honest participant of that group.

They don't care what happens in Iraq. They don't care about the people of Basra.

Political and civil authorities in #Iraq’s oil-rich region of #Basra revealed that activists are planning demonstrations again, in light of the suspension of parliamentary membership of a number of their lawmakers.

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The protests are starting again. Already, there's been a sit-in. They were put on hold for the religious pilgrimage but they are returning. Why? Oil rich Basra produces so much wealth for the government of Iraq yet the people in Basra need jobs (the multi-nationals stealing oil from Iraq don't even try to pretend to employ a significant number of locals). The people can't drink the water unless they want to be part of the over 100,000 so far that have been hospitalized for drinking the water. They don't have regular electricity which was a nightmare in the oppressive heat of summer but will also be bad as winter arrives and temperatures drop.

Not only have these issues not been addressed, there's also the appearance -- on the part of Prime Minister Adel Abdul al-Mahdi -- that these issues are not pressing.

4 Iraq MPs protest government failure to honour Basra, Basra has 25 seats in Iraqi parliament "Four Iraqi lawmakers have suspended their membership in the government after no ministers were chosen to represent Basra in the government" middleeastmonitor.com/20181102-4-ira… via @MiddleEastMnt

It is fair to say that Bill Gates knows how to make headlines. The Microsoft founder was in China yesterday to make a speech on the safe disposal of human waste, and ensured he got maximum exposure by addressing the audience with a jar of human...

U.S. billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates, on Tuesday, unveiled a futuristic toilet in Beijing, that doesn’t need water or sewers and uses chemicals to turn human waste into fertilizer.

The Microsoft Corp co-founder, who a day earlier was one of the high profile guests at a major trade event in Shanghai, also lauded the globalized and free trade systems that made the toilet technology possible.

“I honestly believe trade allows every country to do what it’s best at,” he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

“So when I talk about components of this toilet being made in China, others in Thailand, others in the United States - you really want to be bringing together all of that IQ so that you’re getting that combination.”

A man looks at a toilet design by Cranfield University at the Reinvented Toilet Expo showcasing sewerless sanitation technology in Beijing, China November 6, 2018. (Photo: REUTERS/Thomas Peter.)

The toilet, which Gates said was ready for sale after years of development, is the brainchild of research projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest private philanthropy organization. There are multiple designs of the toilet but all work by separating liquid and solid waste.

“The current toilet simply sends the waste away in the water, whereas these toilets don’t have the sewer. They take both the liquids and solids and do chemical work on it, including burning it in most cases,” Gates told Reuters.

He compared the change from traditional toilets to waterless models as similar to development in computing around the time he founded Microsoft in the mid-1970s.

“In the way that a personal computer is sort of self contained, not a gigantic thing, we can do this chemical processing at the household level,” he said.

KICKING TIRES

Poor sanitation kills half a million children under the age of five annually and costs the globe over $200 billion a year in healthcare costs and lost income, according to the foundation.

Gates’ foundation has committed roughly $200 million to the toilet project and expects to spend the same amount again before the toilets are viable for wide-scale distribution.

“This year the volume of toilets will literally be in the 100s while people are still kicking tires (testing them),” Gates said.

During a speech at the Beijing event, Gates held up a clear jar of human faeces to illustrate the importance of improving sanitation.

“It’s a good reminder that in (the jar) there could be 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.”

It is the first time Gates’ foundation has addressed an event in China, where President Xi Jinping is promoting a three-year “toilet revolution” to build or upgrade 64,000 public toilets by 2020 to help boost tourism and economic growth.

Gates said the next step for the project is to pitch the concept to manufacturers, saying he expects the market for the toilets to be over $6 billion by 2030.

It is fair to say that Bill Gates knows how to make headlines. The Microsoft founder was in China yesterday to make a speech on the safe disposal of human waste, and ensured he got maximum exposure by addressing the audience with...
Reported by New Zealand Herald 43 minutes ago.

U.S. billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates unveiled on Tuesday in Beijing a futuristic toilet that doesn't need water or sewers and uses chemicals to turn human waste into fertilizer.

The Microsoft Corp co-founder, who a day earlier was one of the high profile guests at a major trade event in Shanghai, also lauded the globalised and free trade systems that made the toilet technology possible.

"I honestly believe trade allows every country to do what it's best at," he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

"So when I talk about components of this toilet being made in China, others in Thailand, others in the United States - you really want to be bringing together all of that IQ so that you're getting that combination."

Gates' trip comes amid trade tension between China and the United States, the world's two largest economies, which have slapped tit-for-tat tariffs on goods worth billions of dollars.

The toilet, which Gates said was ready for sale after years of development, is the brainchild of research projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's biggest private philanthropy organisation.

There are multiple designs of the toilet but all work by separating liquid and solid waste.

"The current toilet simply sends the waste away in the water, whereas these toilets don't have the sewer. They take both the liquids and solids and do chemical work on it, including burning it in most cases," Gates told Reuters.

He compared the change from traditional toilets to waterless models as similar to development in computing around the time he founded Microsoft in the mid-1970s.

"In the way that a personal computer is sort of self contained, not a gigantic thing, we can do this chemical processing at the household level," he said.

Poor sanitation kills half a million children under the age of five annually and costs the globe over $200 billion a year in healthcare costs and lost income, according to the foundation.

Gates' foundation has committed roughly $200 million to the toilet project and expects to spend the same amount again before the toilets are viable for wide-scale distribution.

"This year the volume of toilets will literally be in the 100s while people are still kicking tyres (testing them)," Gates said.

During a speech at the Beijing event, Gates held up a clear jar of human faeces to illustrate the importance of improving sanitation.

"It's a good reminder that in (the jar) there could be 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs."

It is the first time Gates' foundation has addressed an event in China, where President Xi Jinping is promoting a three-year "toilet revolution" to build or upgrade 64,000 public toilets by 2020 to help boost tourism and economic growth.

Gates said the next step for the project is to pitch the concept to manufacturers, saying he expects the market for the toilets to be over $6 billion by 2030.

AS ONE of the world’s richest men and most active philanthropists, Bill Gates usually has his hands full. Just not with poop. So it c a me a s a su r pr i se when t he founder of Micros of t br a nd i s he d a j a r of human waste at a forum on t he f...

Gates Foundation and Global Partners Announce Commitments to Advance Commercialization of Disruptive, Off-Grid Toilet Technologies BEIJING, Nov. 6, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) and the China Chamber of International Commerce (CCOIC), today joined global innovators, development banks, private-sector players, and

A child born in 2019 will turn 30 by the middle of the century. How will her interactions with energy change by then?

Interchange co-host Shayle Kann recently penned a piece celebrating his colleague's expected daughter. He outlined eight different scenarios that "bug" will face in her lifetime — and then asked readers to bet on his predictions.

Shayle writes: "The reason I’m introducing Bug relates to a famous quote from Bill Gates’ 1996 memoir: 'We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.' In 10 years, Bug will be entering 5th grade. If we underestimate the change that will happen by then, just imagine what her world will look like as she reaches these milestones and those beyond."

In this episode, we decide whether or not to take Shayle’s bets about the future.

Here are Shayle's predictions:

Bet #1: Bug will control machines with her voice more than with her keyboard.

Bet #2: Bug will never personally drive a car.

Bet #3: By the time Bug buys her first home, especially if she’s in an urban environment, her surroundings will transformed.

Bet #4: By the time Bug shops for her own groceries, >20% of her produce will be grown indoors.

Bet #5: In Bug’s first home of her own, more than half of her electricity load will dynamically respond to grid or price signals.

Bet #6: By the time Bug reaches 30 (in the year 2050), electricity’s market share of final energy consumption will more than double.

Bet #7: More than 50% of Bug’s electricity, as represented by the national breakdown, will come from renewables by the time she’s a sophomore in high school.

Bet #8 : Bug will live over 200 years, and for most of her life, electricity will be her only food.

Would you take these bets? Hit us up on Twitter or in the comment section.

Support for this podcast comes from Wunder Capital. Wunder Capital is the leading commercial solar financing company in the United States. Click here to find out how Wunder Capital can help you finance your next commercial solar project.

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[…] With the two parties each controlling one house of Congress, there's slim chance you'll see major legislation getting passed, which decreases uncertainty in the markets. "Nothing done, nothing undone," is how Bank of America Merrill Lynch put it. […]

The winners and losers from the midterms, Bill Gates wants to build a better toilet, a massive spending spree at Harrods goes off the rails, Alec Baldwin gets more bad news, and "single-use" is the word of the year.
A record number of Ada County voters showed up at the polls in Tuesday's midterm election, part of statewide and national trend that saw unprecedented voter engagement. Idaho's next governor will be Brad Little, who led a Republican slate of candidates who were all successful in their respective contests for statewide office. Republican Janice McGeachin will become Idaho's first female Lieutenant Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra won a tight contest with Democratic challenger Cindy Wilson. The most-anticipated Gem State contest of the evening wasn't even close: A majority of Idaho voters said "yes" to Medicaid expansion, thumbing a collective nose to the Idaho Legislature which has repeatedly pushed back any previous attempt to expand Medicaid to cover tens of thousands of uninsured men, women and children. The other high-profile statewide proposition, an effort to return gambling machines to horse racing venues, went down to defeat following a bruising point/counterpoint media blitz from both sides. At the Idaho State Statehouse, a few Democrats were successful in upsetting incumbent Republican lawmakers in the Idaho House and Senate. In Boise's 15th legislative district, Democrat Steve Berch upended veteran Republican House Rep. Lynn Luker, and Democrat Jake Ellis defeated Republican House Rep. Patrick McDonald. In that same district's State Senate race, incumbent Republican Sen. Fred Martin was leading Democratic challenger Jim Bratnober by just a handful of votes, which will most probably trigger an official recount. In the Wood River Valley, Democrat Muffy Davis handily defeated Republican House Rep. Steve Miller; and in Eastern Idaho, Democratic challenger Chris Abernathy beat Republican House Rep. Dustin Manwaring. Big change will be coming to the Ada County Commission in 2019: two Democratic women won their respective races Tuesday night: Diana Lachiondo defeated Republican incumbent Commissioner Jim Tibbs; and Democrat Kendra Kenyon defeated Republican Sharon Ullman. At the Ada County Highway District, incumbent Paul Woods lost to challenger Mary May and incumbent ACHD Commissioner Kent Goldthorpe held off three challengers. Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson handily won reelection to the U.S. House, and he'll be joined by Republican Russ Fulcher who won his race to see who would take over the vacated seat of outgoing Congressman Raul Labrador. On the national level, Democrats gained control of the U.S. House and several governerships, but Republicans increased their majority in the U.S. Senate. Billionaire Bill Gates wants to build better, cheaper toilets. The New York…